Human Genome Evolved Through Internal Arms Race with Itself

September 29, 2014 1:40 PM

32
0

When you hear about arms races, you don't normally think of genetics. Yet scientists have now found that you may just want to consider it when it comes to the genomes of primates. It's likely that an evolutionary arms race within these genomes drove the evolution of complex regulatory networks that orchestrate the activity of genes in every cell of our bodies.

The arms race in question is between mobile DNA sequences known as "retrotransposons," also known as jumping genes, and the genes that have evolved to control them.